How a Jewish summer camp basketball game 40 years ago fought to undo antisemitic lessons

The Sunday Magazine16:02How a summer camp basketball game changed lives

When Hart Snider was nine years old, he played a basketball game at summer camp that changed his life.

It was 1983 and his teammates were Jewish kids like him staying at Camp BB Riback, on the shores of Pine Lake near Red Deer, Alta.

The opposing team was made up of students from a nearby town called Eckville, who had previously been taught by a notorious Holocaust denier named James (Jim) Keegstra.

"I remember being nervous before they came … talking to my friends about it and thinking what's going to happen," Snider told CBC's Allison Dempster.

His initial worries faded when the Eckville students arrived, and the two groups spent the day together, including playing that fateful basketball game.

It ended up bringing the two teams together, at least for a day. Snider produced an animated short about it with the National Film Board of Canada in 2011, and released a comic book memoir in 2022. Both are titled The Basketball Game.

Snider recently returned to the camp to mark the 40th anniversary of the game. He says he wants to ensure people don't forget about the game, or the lessons he and his fellow players learned that day.

"I think just that people being brave enough to stand up to antisemitism and hate, led to something amazing that I think is now a part of Alberta history. And I hope one day, that if people talk about the Keegstra affair they can also talk about the good that was done," he said.

Keegstra 'an effective teacher, which was scary'

Keegstra served as Eckville's mayor in the 1970s, and had been teaching for 14 years before he was dismissed in 1982.

It was alleged that he had been teaching his high school social studies classes that the Holocaust was a hoax, and that Jewish conspiracies were responsible for many of the world's problems.

He was charged with "wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group" under the Criminal Code of Canada.

The case ended up in the Supreme Court and, in a landmark ruling, became the first successful conviction under the Code's hate speech provisions. Keegstra died in 2014.

Jody Miller Elliot was one of Keegstra's students. She remembers that he liked to debate, but only as long as he won.

"He was an effective teacher, which was scary, because the content he taught you, you learned," said Elliot, 57, who now lives in Langley, B.C.

"Luckily, I had a family that was very forward-thinking and … they understood what he was teaching was incorrect," she said, noting that the affair "divided the town."

Elliot was 16 when she arrived at Camp BB Riback. She says staff at her school hoped that having students spend time with Jewish kids around their ages would help dispel some of what Keegstra taught them.

She remembers being nervous, because of "everything we were told, that Jewish people were evil," she said. But there was still a sense of anticipation.

"Up to that point, I don't remember ever meeting a person of Jewish faith."

'Do you really have horns?'

In Snider's NFB film, which is inspired by his experience but not strictly autobiographical, the Eckville kids first appear to tower over him, with mean, unsmiling faces — representing his initial fear.

"This kid came up to me and actually asked me, like, 'Do you really have horns?' " Snider's character says in the film. "Is this kid really from an international banking conspiracy? Is this kid, like, magical, and can create natural disasters?"

But as the game went on, he felt the fear and animosity fade.

"As the game progressed, it just became about basketball. And I think there's something magical in that, that sports helped us get over, you know, our minds going in circles about all this and just kind of focus on the present and see each other as other kids playing a game," Snider told Dempster.

Elliot didn't play in the basketball game, but she has fond memories of visiting the camp and meeting the Jewish girls who were staying there.

"We were young teenage girls, so we discovered we liked the same things," she said. "I just remember … they didn't want us to be alone and feel not welcome."

The next generation

Students who attended Snider's recent talk commemorating the game's 40th anniversary say they don't have a problem relating to the story.

"Some stereotypes are still said today, even, like, if it's jokingly, like with your friends, like you don't know if they believe them or not and if they're actually serious," said Shayna Cairns, 15, of Edmonton.

Elle Delaney of Saskatoon, 16, called the game "a really good experiment" to help different groups of people learn about each other.

"I do think that Jewish youth kind of know that they have a responsibility to teach other people, especially in our generation [about antisemitism]," she said. "Even though it might not be fair … I think that it's kind of better to embrace that than just be angry over it."

Snider says the game helped both groups understand each other, and that neither was the bad guys.

"It was a teacher who had been teaching this, and to the point where he would say 'If anyone tells you different, they're part of the conspiracy.' And so how do you convince anyone different after that?" he said.

For some, it starts with a simple game of basketball.